I was planning on posting a 1.0 release this week, but Badger went ahead and posted the beta URL so there's no going back.

Tonto is a cross-platform development environment for the Pronto family of remotes; I'm testing on Linux, Mac OS X and Window 2k. The UI bears a great resemblence to ProntoEdit, but it has many things that ProntoEdit does not. Most importantly, it's got a CCF developer's API. Secondly, it has a user-manageable IR database and waveform editor for cleanup and finding discrete codes. In the future it will have a module interface so developers can plug in their own UI components.

There are a few other interesting features. "Undead Pronto" will allow auto-recovery of rebooting Prontos. You can auto-create panels from a remote in the IR database. Learning IR inside of Tonto is very reliable... at least as reliable as on the Pronto. There is a new button-jump feature so that ALT-clicking a button opens the panel that button jumps to, etc, etc.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the look of the Tonto UI. Mostly this is because it looks a lot like ProntoEdit. While this is functional and allows people to migrate more easily, it is not the look that it will ultimately use. However, it is "good enough" for a 1.0 release and will allow others to test the basic functionality of the program. Post 1.0 I will begin to implement a "Continuous Emulation Edit Layout" that both removes the need for an emulator and provides much better information and control over your editing.

I did suffer a huge setback this week which is why 1.0 is late... the RAID array that powers my house failed in the most improbably way. I do not know yet if it's recoverable. In the meantime, I've lost a little bit of work and it will take me a week or so to put things in order.

In the meantime, if you've got gripes with ProntoEdit, I highly encourage you to go check out the latest "experimental" release of Tonto (0.985). If you can, please grab the IBM JVM. Though it's more difficult to acquire and install, it's substantiall better than Sun's and does not suffer from some of the font bugs.

The project url is:

[Link: giantlaser.com]

Happy hacking,

stewart


This message was edited by Stewart Allen on 12/14/01 01:26.07.

Stewart, as far as I can tell, the Windows package (tonto-0_984.zip) only contains a bourne shell script. No batch file. Looking at the UNIX version (tonto-0_984_tar.gz), I see it has a batch file in the bin directory.

A couple of other points.

You refer to the experimental release as 0.985, but it is labelled 0.984 on the web site (both download links have the same name).

Also, the generic UNIX version has a comment in the shell script: 'uncomment on linux to try my own comm library'. The line below is uncommented. Not sure whether you intend that to be uncommented on the generic version.

No, I do not include a default .bat on Windows since it has to be hand-edited. If you install the JVM, then the .jar file can be double-clicked directly to launch Tonto. Also, the .bat will leave a console DOS window which is ugly. Clicking the .jar directly does not.

I was wrong about the version. I lost 0.985 when my RAID array failed. 0.984 is the most current.

All versions of Tonto now use my own Comm libraries and do not require external JavaComm. That comment in the shell script should be removed.

thanks,

stewart

for the Mac OSX users out there. It works! I got in touch with Stewart last week and downloaded the beta. You will of course need some sort of serial to usb converter to connect. I use the Keyspan twinn serial and a Palm mac adapter. One trick that I have learned with most usb devices is that they work better if plugged directly into to computer. Powered hubs work pretty well and the keyboard Bus is dicey at best.

This is great because i have been unable to get VPC 5.0 to connect to pronto under X.

Will
Imac 500se
osx10.1.1

Please note that I just found a bug in 0.984 that corrupts UDB IR aliases in action lists during a re-save. I'm working to put out a new release sometime tonight that fixes this.

I just posted 0.985 which should fix the UDB corruption problem. Please use this version instead of 0.984 before saving anything that uses UDB codes! If you got bitten by the previous bug, just edit the hex of the broken IR code and remove the "0000 0000 0000" prefix.

Disclaimer: this is software (not a typo). It might eat your data, pee on your carpet or worse. Please make backups of any ccf files you care about before editing them.